STAR WARS Zero Company™

Anyone who has bounced hard off XCOM 2's Avenger knows the exact flavour of stress I mean: the strategic timer ticking down while you're already three turns behind on the map. Zero Company keeps the grammar of that game (cover, flanking, overwatch, an action economy you learn to count in your head) and quietly deletes the panic. There is no countdown breathing down your neck, missions are explicitly built to be played at your own pace, and you can save at any point inside a firefight. Bit Reactor is staffed by people who worked on the modern XCOM revival, and it shows in the fundamentals. What they have not done is rebuild the punishing strategic layer those games were famous for, and that omission is the single most important thing to understand before you buy. On the ground it plays clean. Cover states read at a glance, overwatch cones can be set to lock a chokepoint, and the squad command tools let you stack a coordinated turn rather than fire four independent rifles and hope. Squad customisation is the part I kept fiddling with: you're assembling a roster of Clone Wars era specialists, kitting them out, and deciding which abilities you actually want online for a given mission profile instead of shuffling a hundred marginal stat modifiers. That is a design choice with a clear target and it lands. The depth here comes from positioning and turn sequencing, not from an inventory screen. My best runs came from picking one setup piece per squad, one damage payoff, and treating everything else as insurance. This is where I make the case I usually make about a 200 hour grand strategy game, except this time it's easy. If you have never finished a turn-based tactics campaign, this is the most sensible entry point on PC right now. Difficulty is adjustable, mid-mission saves mean a blown 15 percent shot doesn't cost you an hour, and the Star Wars framing does real teaching work, because you already know what a droid firing line and a clone trooper are supposed to do before the tutorial gets around to explaining it. Learn three habits and you'll be fine: never end a turn with a unit out of cover, spend the last action on overwatch whenever you can't confirm a kill, and move as a group instead of as four heroes. Newcomers who play on default and stop reloading after every miss will get a genuinely satisfying campaign out of it, and more importantly they'll come out able to play the harder games in this genre. Now the 25 percent, because Mostly Positive across three thousand or so reviews is a real signal rather than a review-bomb blip. Veterans will hit the ceiling of the tactical puzzle earlier than they'd like, because once the pressure valve is removed the optimal line is often just patience: overwatch, advance, repeat. The AI is competent at punishing sloppy positioning and much less interesting at surprising you once you're playing tidily, which is the difference between a campaign you finish and one you replay. I'd also flag the feature list itself. Steam Cloud, achievements, trading cards, HDR, full DualSense support, all present and accounted for. Workshop and mod tools, absent. For a tactics game the long tail has always been community content, and without it the shipped campaign is simply what you get, forever. Note too that the store's genre tags list this as Sports and Simulation, which tells you the metadata was filled in by someone who has never taken an overwatch shot. So buy it as a well-built, generous, license-appropriate tactics campaign that respects a newcomer's time and doesn't demand a wiki tab open on a second monitor. Buy it knowing it is not a replacement for the game that keeps you awake at 3am recalculating a supply raid. It's the friendlier version of a genre that honestly needed one. If you already have 500 hours in Long War, temper your expectations accordingly. If you have zero hours in anything like this, start here and thank me in about a month.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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